My father walked over to me, placing a heavy, warm hand on my shoulder. It was the touch of a living man, not a corpse, and the reality of it hit me like a physical blow.
“Your mother didn’t send that text to hurt you, Julián. She sent it because they were holding a gun to her head, forcing her to lure you back to the house,” my father explained, his voice laced with a grim, calculated anger. “The people I worked for think I hid the ledger in our family home. They staged my heart attack using a localized paralytic agent. If Agent Vance hadn’t pulled my body from the transit vehicle before it reached the morgue, I would have been cremated alive.”
A cold sweat broke out across my neck. “Celeste… the kids. They’re with Mom.”
“They’re safe,” Agent Vance interjected, checking her watch. “A tactical team intercepted your wife’s car two miles from the cemetery under the guise of a traffic violation. They’ve been moved to a safe house in Newark. But your mother stayed behind to keep up appearances so the clean-up crew wouldn’t realize the trap had failed.”
My father turned to a desk in the center of the unit and picked up a heavy encrypted flash drive.
“For twenty years, I kept a manila envelope with the gravedigger because I knew that if the system failed, the cemetery would be the only place they wouldn’t watch,” my father said, handing me the drive. “This is the ledger. It contains the routing numbers for the entire cartel network operating out of the state assembly.”
Suddenly, the floodlights outside the storage facility flickered and died. The security cameras on the awning cut to black.
From the dark highway of Route 9, the distant sound of heavy tires gripping the gravel approach echoed through the night. Two pairs of headlights turned off, driving into the facility using only their running lights.
Agent Vance drew her sidearm, her posture turning rigid. “They traced the burner phone ping. We have about ninety seconds before they breach the perimeter.”
My father looked at me, a fierce, protective light in his eyes. He grabbed a heavy steel crowbar from the corner and handed it to me, while reaching into a desk drawer to pull out a compact pistol of his own.
“I spent twenty years making a plan to protect this family, son,” Raymond Mercer whispered, racking the slide of the gun with a sharp, metallic snap. “Now it’s time to execute it. Don’t look back.”
